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How do you ensure that the cards marked Priority are actually worked on as a priority?

• nostrademons 12y ago
  (Never worked on a Kanban team per se, but I worked on several teams at Google that used this system under different names.) You don't. However, you incentivize people who work on the gritty, hard-to-do, high-priority problems. Come promotion time these are usually the people that get promoted, and get their pick of further projects. The reason this system works is that it implicitly trusts your developers. Most developers don't deliberately want to work on stuff that is useless and nobody cares about. However, they often don't know what the priority tasks are, or management's judgment of a high-priority task is actually blocked by some other seemingly low-priority task, or they're afraid of spending lots of time on something that other people won't recognize as important. By getting a written record of which tasks were judged to be important by the team and who did them, many of these fears are alleviated.